The Body in Question

by Jill Ciment

  The news trucks are back in force. A full-size charter bus from the Villages has replaced the minibus. The line of spectators waiting for a seat at the Anca Butler trial has doubled since last Friday.

  “What’s going on?” the church lady asks the deputy as the van descends into the parking garage.

  “You know I can’t answer that,” he says.

  “Maybe Anca’s going to testify?” Cornrows speculates.

  “Not unless she’s going to testify against herself. The prosecution hasn’t rested,” the chemical engineer says. “Stephana must be next.”

  “The twin? How do you know?” the church lady asks.

  “Why else the hoopla?”

  Hanging back, F-17 catches C-2’s sleeve as the jury crowds into the garage elevator. He says, “We’ll take the next one.”

  As soon as the elevators doors kiss, he asks, “Do you think he’s going to say anything? What did he see exactly?”

  “My hand on your door.”

  On the ride up, the elevator stops on the first floor. A group of seniors bull in. From the furtive exchanges and smiles of recognition, C-2 realizes that the jurors in the Anca Butler trial have become minor celebrities, the talk of the Villages. She wouldn’t be surprised if the old gentleman in the elastic-band jeans asked for her autograph.

  In the jury room, she avoids F-17 lest they be overly conspicuous after the private elevator ride up. The alternate hasn’t taken his eyes off her. She braves a moment alone with him.

  “I guess you couldn’t sleep either,” she says, joining him on the sofa.

  “It was a real hot night.”

  “Almost woke up Doc”—F-17’s nickname among the jurors—“by mistake.”

  “Lucky I was there,” he says, grinning as he had last night.

  * * *

  · · ·

  The chemical engineer was right. Stephana takes the stand. She hasn’t been in court since the voir dire. Someone has instructed her to still her animated eyes and sweep up her blond hair, so that the jury has a full view of her exceptionally beautiful face. C-2 can’t help but compare the sisters. Where Anca’s cheeks are pudding, Stephana’s are bone.

  C-2 notes that the sisters haven’t yet acknowledged each other. Stephana is too busy glancing around the gallery. Anca’s stare is drilled to the floor.

  “Did Anca tell you that she started the fire?” asks the prosecutor after Stephana is sworn in.

  Stephana looks defiantly at her sister, demanding that Anca acknowledge her, but Anca refuses to raise her eyes. C-2 isn’t sure how, but the sisters are communicating.

  “Yes, she told me she started the fire.”

  “Did you put those words in Anca’s mouth?”

  “No.”

  “How long after the fire did Anca confess to you?”

  “That night,” Stephana says, explaining that the fire was out by the time she got home, that Tim was sitting on the curb, crying. “He told me Caleb was dead and that Anca had started the fire. Tim didn’t know where she was,” Stephana continues in response to the prosecutor’s prompts, “but I knew she’d be with her dogs. She’d locked herself inside one of the kennels. She was threatening to kill all her dogs and then herself.”

  C-2’s gaze ping-pongs between the pudding cheeks and the bones. Only when Stephana looks directly at the jury, full-face, to tell them that Anca wished Caleb had never been born, does C-2 understand why the twins look so different. Anca’s nose is asymmetrical, Stephana’s is perfect.

  “What was Anca’s demeanor when you found her in the kennel?”

  “Anca doesn’t have a demeanor.”

  “Did you ask her if she started the fire?”

  “I didn’t need to. She told me she started it but that Caleb wasn’t supposed to die. She was supposed to rescue him.”

  “Why would she put her brother in danger only to rescue him?”

  The defense objects, but Stephana is allowed to answer. “She’d done stuff like this before. She would make her dogs drink hydrogen peroxide so they’d vomit and then she’d nurse them back to health.”

  “Did she tell you why she made her dogs sick?”

  “She said she did it so that Mom and Dad would think the therapy is working. What I mean by that,” Stephana clarifies, “is that Anca’s in treatment to learn how to empathize. Anca’s on the spectrum.”

  “What spectrum is that?”

  “The autism spectrum.”

  “Do you think Anca loved Caleb?”

  “Objection,” says the defense attorney, who has been writing notes on her yellow pad to Anca, who doesn’t read them. Anca is sneaking another chocolate bar.

  “Did you love Caleb?”

  Stephana’s symmetrical face erupts into wet chaos.

  “Yes,” she says.

  C-2 looks over at Anca, who has finally raised her eyes and acknowledged that her twin is on the stand. The leaden eyes in the blank oval are the diametric opposite of Stephana’s Sturm und Drang.

  C-2 writes:

  identical or fraternal?

  * * *

  · · ·

  “Identical,” Cornrows says, lighting her after-lunch cigarette with F-17’s last match.

  “They don’t look all that alike,” C-2 says, lighting her cigarette with Cornrows’s burning tip. “Stephana’s nose is sharper.”

  “Environment factors in,” F-17 says, using C-2’s cigarette to start his. “Even in utero, one twin takes up more space. If soft tissue, like nose cartilage, is pressed against the uterine wall, the shape can be influenced.”

  “Anca’s right-handed and Stephana’s a lefty,” Cornrows says.

  “How do you know?” C-2 asks, unable to conceal her surprise at Cornrows’s astuteness. C-2 is a northeastern snob, despite having grown up around Vegas, in a fourplex, aluminum foil taped over the windows to keep cool. Her mother had risen from even poorer prospects, a trailer, and had stunned the family when she rose to become a blackjack dealer. Cornrows reminds C-2 of her mother, that same mix of chattiness and wile.

  “Anca twists her hair with her right hand and Stephana twirls hers with her left hand,” Cornrows replies.

  “They’re mirror-image twins,” F-17 says. “They come from a single egg, but the egg doesn’t split in two right away. The two fetuses develop reverse asymmetric features—right- and left-handed, birthmarks on opposite sides, or hair whorls that swirl in opposite directions.”

  “Does that mean one twin is good and the other is evil?” Cornrows asks.

  * * *

  · · ·

  “Let’s talk about that night,” the prosecutor says as soon as Stephana settles back into the witness chair after lunch. “You said you came home from your afterschool job at six. You work at Popeyes. What is your job at Popeyes? Do you manage only the drive-thru window? Do you normally work till six? Where was Tim at that time? I’m going to show you a diagram of your house. Could you point out where Tim was? Could you point out where the firemen were?”

  It is like listening to a crazy relation tell you everything, I mean everything, about their day. “I took the bus home. It stops on 441. Tim and I were going to see a movie. In Ocala. I think it was Horrible Bosses. I don’t remember who picked the film. I think it started at 6:40, but Tim likes to watch the previews.”

  The glut of facts has caused C-2 and the other jurors to grow sleepy after the heavy lunch, all except the alternate. He is scribbling away. From C-2’s vantage point one chair above him, three chairs to his left, she can almost see his notebook. As if to relieve a crimp in her neck, C-2 stretches and steals a peek at his open page. It is black with doodles of naked women. But not helter-skelter breasts and buttocks. He has begun with a tiny naked woman dead center, then drawn an outline around her, and another around that, and another and another, a woman
inside a woman inside a woman, like an X-ray of Russian dolls.

  Is his whole notebook filled with naked women, or did he only start doodling them after he caught her trying to sneak into F-17’s room?

  * * *

  · · ·

  After seven hours of Stephana’s testimony, and with another matinee performance tomorrow, the jury unanimously votes to return to the motel and order takeout. The seven of them have run out of small talk and can no longer abide one another’s company without alcohol.

  In the motel lobby, as the jury recites their menu orders to the ex-military, a complicated roundtable of indecisions and specificity—raw not grilled, no ice, extra Thousand Island—C-2 and F-17 slip away, racing through the parking lot.

  They kiss behind the dumpster, then light up cigarettes, like teenagers, but Cornrows finds them.

  “I didn’t mean to freak you out,” she says at their startled reactions.

  What did she see?

  Does she know?

  Did the alternate tell her?

  Will she tell the church lady?

  Will the church lady tell the deputy?

  Will the deputy tell the judge?

  Will C-2 tell her husband?

  Cornrows sticks out a beggar’s hand.

  “I promise to buy my own pack tomorrow,” she says.

  As C-2 sits in her room that evening, picking at the microwave-soggy vegetarian fajitas, she doesn’t practice eating alone. She is dining with F-17, separated only by a quarter inch of gypsum board.

  “Show me how you dissect a body,” she says.

  “So that’s your secret fetish,” he says.

  C-2 is supine. She reaches for his hand in the dark and uses it to draw a Y-shaped line from under each breast up to the sternum and then the throat. “Is this how you begin?”

  “That’s if you’re performing an autopsy, searching for a cause of death. A dissection isn’t only about how someone died, it’s about how someone lived. The bodies arrive in two shrouds, one for the body, the other for the head.”

  He covers her with the sheet.

  “The medical students have never seen a dead body before. We ask them to remove only the body shroud. A couple of students always break down.”

  He slides the sheet off her.

  “We ask them to roll the body prone.”

  He rolls her over.

  “We start with the back, the most impersonal part of the body, to help the students adjust. We make a series of cuts, divide the back into four equal sheets of skin.”

  He draws, very lightly, a line from the base of her skull to her buttocks, another from scapula to wing. He draws a third and fourth along the lateral edges of her body from under her armpits to her hips.

  “We lift off the skin.”

  “Is there blood?”

  “No blood. They’ve been embalmed, a light embalm, just a little formaldehyde. Next we move to the upper arm and shoulder.”

  He rolls her supine again, and lifts her arm, folding it gently behind her head.

  “The armpit is ticklish because it’s one of the most sensitive places on the body. All the sensations in our fingertips must pass through it on their way to the brain.”

  He draws a line along the path of those sensations.

  “Next we examine the hand.”

  He lifts hers and traces its bone structure.

  “My students get very emotional when they first examine the hand. A hand, in its own way, is as personal as a face. Some of the hands are still wearing nail polish. It’s the first time my students truly realize it is a human being.”

  He puts down her hand.

  “It’s time to open you up,” he says.

  “Do you crack the chest?”

  “No, we saw the bones laterally, remove the sternum with ribs in one unit.”

  “What do you see first?”

  “The lungs.”

  “Not the heart?”

  “The heart is buried in the mediastinum, enclosed in a sac of fluid to keep it safe while it pumps. The heart is only attached to the sac’s posterior wall by veins and aortas. They anchor the heart to the body while allowing it a lot of flexibility to move around, like a dog on a leash. Otherwise, it might wander off.”

  After he finishes with her heart, he wants to have sex again. She knows he can’t accept that there is no future for them beyond this room. At fifty-two, she has a different kind of sexual power than she had at twenty-four. She doesn’t like this new kind of power one bit, but she also can’t get enough of it.

  The court registrar reminds Stephana that she is still under oath. It is the defense attorney’s turn this morning.

  “Yesterday, you told the prosecutor that you and Anca kept a journal together,” the defense counsel says, holding up an old-fashioned leather-bound diary marked with a blue sticker.

  C-2 has no memory of Stephana testifying that she and Anca kept a journal. She was too preoccupied watching naked women proliferate in the alternate’s notebook.

  “Did you each write your own entries?”

  “No,” Stephana says. “I wrote my own, and Anca dictated hers to me.”

  “So the journal contains only your handwriting. Could you read us the underlined entry dated three days prior to the fire?” She hands Stephana the journal, open to a marked page.

  “I will light a match,” Stephana reads, “and walk back the way I came, touching it against the wet places. At first the flames will be pale and eager, then they will become yellow with bits of red. I will let the flames grow tall, even to the nursery window, so that the danger will be at its highest before I rush in to save Caleb.”

  “Is that your handwriting?”

  “Yes, but I only wrote down what Anca told me to.”

  “Are you familiar with a short story called ‘The Heroine’ by Patricia Highsmith?”

  The prosecutor objects. The attorneys squabble. A sidebar is called.

  “Didn’t you write an essay about ‘The Heroine’ for your AP English class?” the defense counsel continues after the judge gives the okay.

  “Yes.”

  “Would you read us the underlined passage from ‘The Heroine’?” The defense counsel hands Stephana a Xerox of the story.

  “ ‘Then she lit a match,’ ” Stephana reads, “ ‘and walked back the way she had come, touching it against the wet places….At first the flames were pale and eager, then they became yellow with bits of red….She would let the flames grow tall, even to the nursery window, before she rushed in, so that the danger would be at its highest.’ ”

  “Anca’s not in your AP class, is she? Anca doesn’t take AP classes, does she? Isn’t Anca in a special program for students with learning disabilities? You’re asking us to believe that she memorized a paragraph from a story you wrote a paper on and then dictated it to you? Could you tell us what the story is about?”

  Another objection, row, sidebar.

  The judge recesses court so that she can retreat to her chambers to read the story. Fifteen minutes later, she’s back, a coffee stain on the Xerox printout. She rules that the jury will not get to hear the plot, but they will get to hear the three paragraphs preceding the cribbed diary entry.

  “ ‘If only there were a flood…,’ ” the court register reads in an affectless voice. “ ‘She imagined the water coming higher and higher around the house, until it almost rushed into the nursery. She would rescue the children and swim with them to safety.

  “ ‘Or if there were an earthquake…She would rush in among falling walls and pull the children out. Perhaps she would go back for some small thing—one of Nicky’s toys—and be killed! Then the Christiansens would know how much she loved them.

  “ ‘Or if there were a fire…Fires were common things. There might be a terrible fire
just from the gasoline that was in the garage…

  “ ‘She poured some gasoline on a corner of the house, rolled the tank further, and poured some more. She went on like this until she reached the far corner. Then she lit a match and walked back the way she had come, touching it against the wet places…

  “ ‘At first the flames were pale and eager, then they became yellow with bits of red. Lucille began to relax. She would let the flames grow tall, even to the nursery window, before she rushed in, so that the danger would be at its highest.’ ”

  * * *

  · · ·

  “Was Lucille autistic?” asks Cornrows, during lunch.

  “Who’s Lucille?” asks the church lady.

  “The heroine of the short story,” says the chemical engineer.

  “Aren’t heroines always supposed to be good?” asks Cornrows.

  “That’s the irony of the title,” says the chemical engineer.

  “Are you talking about the daughter?” asks the church lady.

  “Lucille wasn’t their daughter,” Cornrows says. “She called them ‘the Christiansens.’ ”

  “You’re not allowed to discuss the trial,” warns the deputy.

  “We’re discussing a piece of fiction,” says F-17.

  “What I’d like to know is why we aren’t allowed to hear the story for ourselves,” says the schoolteacher.

  “I don’t get it either, why does the judge keep us in the dark?” asks the church lady. “Aren’t we supposed to find the truth?”

  “I warned you,” says the deputy.

  “We’re not discussing the case, we’re discussing why Justice wears a blindfold,” says F-17.

  “We’re only allowed to hear evidence that can be proved,” the schoolteacher tells the church lady.

  “How do you prove the plot of a story?” asks Cornrows.

  “What the fuck are we discussing here?” asks the alternate.

  “You don’t have to be so crude,” says the schoolteacher.